Best white balance for night sky photography?

alegator said:

alegator wrote:

Say I shoot the night sky (stars, milky way) on a moonless sky. Then I pp the RAW file in LR. What would be the best TEMP (kelvin) setting?

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I don't think that there is any "correct" answer to your question. It will certainly depend on what colour, if any, you actually have in the image.

Play around with the settings and choose those that give you the image that you prefer.

I would go with a "daylight" balance of 5200--5500 degrees K. Of course, you are free to vary the balance wildly depending on any ambient (city) light. My reasoning is that any moonlight should be daylight balanced and it might be a good place to start to show star colors.

hotdog321 said:

hotdog321 wrote:

I would go with a "daylight" balance of 5200--5500 degrees K. Of course, you are free to vary the balance wildly depending on any ambient (city) light. My reasoning is that any moonlight should be daylight balanced and it might be a good place to start to show star colors.

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He did ask about a moonless night but I think that it is a theoretical question only. I agree that with a moon it should be "daylight".

There might be a case for saying that B&W is correct for the sky on a moonless night without any ambient light pollution.

You have answered your own question - shoot raw and adjust the color so it looks good to you.

That is unless you are shooting for technical reasons and it is important to the journal review people that the color of the photograph is accurate.

To render the color of the stars fairly well, I’d use daylight so as to balance the range of color evenly between red and blue. However, the color of the night sky can be problematic: what looks sky blue to me will often turn out orange due to urban street lighting.

Be aware that in dim lighting the eye’s own color perception is strongly altered due to the Purkinje Effect, which lessens the eye’s response to long wavelengths of light. Because of this, what the camera captures is likely not what you see, which is why the color of city lighting can appear to be much more prominent in photos compared to human vision.

Because of the Purkinje Effect, I’d adjust the colors to be closer to how I remember seeing them, and that is typically a dark sky blue color, which is biased from blue towards cyan, and not from blue towards purple. Adjust so that B > G > R in the image. If this shifts the color of the stars too much, you can always use a mask to not modify the color of the stars.

I developed a Photoshop action that will largely correct for the Purkinje Effect, but unfortunately it is specific to my particular model of camera.

Typically I try to underexpose the image enough so that the stars keep most of their color, and then bring up the sky brightness and color in post processing.

As almost every object you can see in the sky is either self-luminous - stars - or lit by the sun - planets, satellites - I'd go for about 5600K as a baseline simply because that is the light that our eyes are accustomed to treat as standard, after about a billion years of evolution.

I don't know where these people shoot with daylight white balance. I shoot in the darkest available skies within 2-3 hours of me and daylight without fail gives me orange skies.

The bestis use a raw image and get a feel for it sliding the settings in lightroom for example. If not you can just try the different settings, you will be able to tell for sure whether the image is way too blue or orange on the lcd.

With the moon, daylight. Without the moon I use tungsten white balance to get rid of the orange color with even a tiny amount of light pollution. Tungsten gets me quite close and I adjust as necessary. Sometimes I use fluorescent as an alternative as it can generate interesting colors. If there are any clouds they will be much more suscetible to ambient light than the sky.

Anyhow experiment all the wb check on your lcd.It'll be the best and cost you 5 min.l

For shooting stars/galaxies/nebulae on a moonless night, I usually set my color balance manually at around 5000º K on both the D500 and D850. To my eye, this gives the most natural representation. Of course, if I want to add more color to a nebula, I will just paint in reds or blues with a very low (5-10% opacity) until I get the desired effect.

I hope this helps!